The opening shot of the planet Jupiter’s swirling rings of fire, in Anita LaBelle and Albert Gabriel Nigrin’s new experimental film Ascension from the Disco Inferno, becomes deeply ominous in retrospect, as a vision of an uninhabitable, hellish orb. As the film tracks the descent of two club girls into an infernal discotheque—seemingly located in the cavernous basement of an abandoned mall, and lit by a glittering disco ball that bathes the space in crimson-colored sparks—the two women are revealed to be modern-day maenads, i.e., female followers of Dionysus, in search of a mindless state of bliss summoned via the copious ingestion of liquor and rituals of ecstatic dance.
But as the two women blissfully begin to spin and to pose, first alone to music in their own heads, and then together, after colliding into one another like wayward stars—the darker undercurrents of a profound disruption in the universe, as we know it, begins to manifest. These maenads proceed to open the same little black purse that contains unsent post-cards and matches, rather than small flasks of liquor or brightly colored, mind-altering pills. And as the matchsticks flare up, and the women seemingly ingest the sticks, flame and all, their ritual of ingestion at once evoke ancient fire-worship and an inevitably doomed attempt to put out said fire.
Evelyn Reese in Ascension from the Disco Inferno
Here LaBelle and Nigrin’s shared vision of a contemporary underworld being set aflame--and thus, by extension, the looming horror of the climate crisis, that we are collectively putting out of our minds, even as we pretend that we’re doing otherwise—comes into focus. In turn, the visuals of this trance-like and unsettling experimental film begin to beg the viewer’s closer attention. For example, why are acid-green neon lights left to flicker on in utterly deserted urban streets, seemingly for eternity? Why are escalators still programmed to rumble up and down, purposelessly, in decommissioned malls? Why are we wasting electricity so wantonly, and heedlessly laying waste to the planet Earth to generate ever more of it? And consider, as well, how the two modern-day maenads begin to spin across backdrops torched by images of raging forest fires. Likewise, note that both women pose for photos inside the Disco Inferno even though cell-phones are never seen in the film. Even when out of sight, these tiny suckers of electricity that we all carry demand to be kept charged, demand our constant attention, and demand to be “fed” so that they can continue to emit artificial light.
Mana Kurisu in Ascension from the Disco Inferno
And consider, in turn, the haunting, evocative soundtrack created by Nigrin, which serves as both a correlate and a counterpoint to the film’s visuals. Note that we hear overlapping readings of Sylvia Plath’s poem Maenad (which she published in 1959, at the age of 27), intoned by a multiplicity of female voices, who ask to be fed “berries of the dark.” Alongside these intoned words, we hear the chirping sounds of newly hatched cicadas emerging from their years-long slumber in the Earth. Consider that female cicadas depend on the cycles of Nature to stay in place over the eons, so that they can lay their eggs in fertile soil, with total, optimistic certainty that their young will emerge 13 or 17 years later to witness the glorious light of the sun.
Evelyn Reese and Mana Kurisu in Ascension from the Disco Inferno
And yet, LaBelle and Nigrin close their film on a somewhat optimistic note, as the two modern-day maenads seem to bring one another back into active consciousness as dawn breaks, lifting up their arms to the sky, and ascending up and out of the infernal underworld, via ropes that they pull taut, and then via the same ghostly escalators by which they initially descended. However, as the two women fade out of view, a gray sky reveals soot floating in the air, startled birds, and a dimly-lit sun—a bleak inference that the sun is already becoming lost in human-generated haze, and perhaps soon to be no more than a second moon.
The New Jersey Film Festival has started a new concert series with a moving image component as part of their programming with the hope of reawakening the mostly dormant New Brunswick Music Scene. Noise-Ambient musician Jim Haynes will be coming from California to do a show on October 18. This performance will include accompanying projections of experimental films by Marjorie Conrad, Anita Labelle and Albert Gabriel Nigrin. Festival Director Al Nigrin said: “We are inviting musicians whose work I really admire and whose work I think is also very cinematic.”
The Jim Haynes AV Concert with film projections featuring the concert version of Ascension from the Disco Inferno as well as a concert edit of Marjorie Conrad's film Desire Path will take place on Friday, October 18 at 7PM in Voorhees Hall #105/Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ. General Admission Jim Haynes Concert Ticket=$25. To buy tickets go here.
